In this post I want to give those of you who are looking forward to hosting Venice Unleashed servers a little overview of the kind of workloads you are looking at for full or almost full high frequency servers. I have three examples of loads on 120 Hz and 60 Hz with data about CPU and Network usage as well as the servers performance itself. This is not a definitive guide but it should give you an idea about the kind of hardware you'd need for high frequency servers with 60 or 120 Hz.

This is not server-grade hardware. However I went for the i7 because of its very good single-thread performance. And it was cheaper (25€/month thanks to a promotion) than any server with a comparable Xeon CPU. An i7 is probably fine for game servers anyway since features like ECC aren't really all that important.

General Notes:

Vehicles are much heavier on the CPU and network than players

DLC maps will always load faster

Loading times will be much worse on mechanical drives

Bandwidth and CPU requirements on high frequency are much higher than on 30 Hz

I set the affinity of each instance to two of the CPUs 8 threads. That way they don't interfere which each other and reading the CPU load of each individual instance becomes easier

General Performance:Those might be boring to most of you but I found it interesting.Startup process (average):Vanilla Maps: 26sDLC Maps: 21s

Level Load Time (average):Vanilla map: 12sDLC Map: 8s

Idle Load:150-200 MB RAM (depends on loaded map, etc.)0.4% CPU

Extreme Scenarios:Those numbers were recorded over short amounts of time in a round and represent performance around peak loads.

There is no data on 30 Hz available from my side. But its safe to assume that it will run on just about anything.

Conclusion:In general it came as a surprise to me how high the bandwidth demand of high frequency really is. Those of you that have servers with metered connections might want to make sure that they have enough traffic per month available to run high frequrency servers.

Most server CPUs are not overclockable so you're stuck with whatever performance it has.Most newer Intel Xeon Quad Cores should be good enough for 32 player 120 Hz (without vehicles or maps with few vehiles), 24 player 120 Hz with vehicles or 64 player 60 Hz Infantry only or 32/48 player 60 Hz with vehicles.

At this point only a Xeon 1245v2 and a Xeon 1240v3 have been tested by me. Both did fine with 48 players at 60 Hz and 24 players at 120 Hz. 32 players at 120 Hz (with vehicles) was only tested on the 1240v3 and was not playable.

I might edit this in the future when I get some more readings. But those are the best I have right now.